Twitter helps marketers find live audiences with event targeting

Twitter is all about real-time reactions to events as they happen. With the right hashtag, you can join a conversation with thousands of people all following the same television show, news story, or sporting event. Advertisers would love to be in on this party and now Twitter has unveiled a new advertising tool to help them reach the right people at the right time.

Up until now if an advertiser wanted to target people watching the SuperBowl they'd need to guess about which accounts they wanted to target or what hashtags they wanted to use. While some of that was easy, the live nature of the event meant that things were always changing and if the focus of the event changed the advertising would miss the mark.

Twitter has now taken out the guess work. With their new event targeting tool, the process is largely automated. Twitter now has an event calendar with all of the major global events, everything from the MTV Video Music Awards to the Super Bowl listed out with historical data regarding how the event has previously performed and what keywords and hashtags are associated with it.

The good news for users is that this will not increase the amount of advertising that you see. Twitter has rules in place regarding how often ads pop up in a given period of time. If anything, it means that when you do see an ad while you're tweeting about the next UFC event, it might actually be an ad you're interested in. Maybe.